In this new standup show – his first tour since 2010 – Lenny Henry says he generally turns down reality TV offers. He said yes to Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters (no, me neither) because he wanted to pay for an extension.
At first one wonders what home improvements Still at Large might be funding: it is difficult to get a handle on its purpose. In a first half of pure standup, there is some new material but also old ground being re-trodden. He does a bit about his family discovering the signs for the Black Country when they arrived from Jamaica; many first heard the joke in 1989 in Live and Unleashed, when he told us that his father declared, “the queen has set aside some land for me already.”
Bands can revisit old hits but comedians have to keep coming up with new material. Henry appears to be challenging that assumption. There are the impressions of the Jamaican matriarch of his large family, jokes about Prince and Tiswas – it’s a greatest hits set at times.
In a more personal second half, Henry fields audience questions – almost every one of which allows him to play a video from his now five decades-long career – and you realise this show is a victory lap and it would be churlish to deny it. In the first half he makes much of being 67, a setup that allows him to later show footage of himself when he started out as a 16-year-old, and you realise just how far he has come and how long he’s been doing this.
There is added emotion for the audience and Henry that this early stop on the tour is “home”. He knows all the areas the audience say they are from and is able to point “just down the road” to where he went to school and hospital to visit his brother. There’s also plenty of his family in the crowd – it makes for a very warm and welcoming audience.
When asked about his comedy heroes, he cites Tommy Cooper and Richard Pryor: he is in some ways a combination of both. He is also perhaps the only British comedian from the 1970s who could deliver an acceptable joke about slavery, which he does with a hilarious bit about the way three Black Britons in his village communicate. It’s comparable to a Chris Rock routine about a slave who can read. Henry has received criticism during his standup career for being toothless while the likes of Rock were always biting, but by virtue of surviving here he gets to bare his teeth and prove he’s a (Theophilus P) Wildebeeste that can still roar.